“Hush,” said Rolla.
“Hush,” said Grandma and Mother.
“Take your time, Rolla,” Father said. “Too early in the evening to go courtin’ anyway.” He glanced at James and Rolla in one stroke. Rolla knew his brother wouldn’t dare snigger or smile when their father spoke. Grandma nodded and patted Rolla’s hand.
Rolla split a second piece of cornbread. Buttered it. “It’s good, Ma,” he said again. He saw her look at his father and he wondered, how had courtship been for them.
“Eat more than just cornbread, Rolla. It’s a walk to Chestnut Street.” Ma passed him collard greens. Rolla heaped collard greens over his plate and reached for the cider vinegar. He caught his mother’s eye.
“’Scuse me, didn’t mean to reach.” He thought, Can’t be nervous already, 22nd Infantry. Grandma smiled. Mother nodded once. Father didn’t look up. James puffed out his chest trying too hard not to giggle. The baby sister lowered her head and made smacking noises. Out the backdoor, frogs continued chirping, seeking courtship.
After three more bites, Rolla pushed back the chair and stood up. “Thanks, be going now.” He thought he sounded like a nervous man in his own house; stop it. He nodded to the rest of his family and silently blessed them. James looked ready to burst with a hiccup and cough to hide the giggles.
Courtship. The awkward moment in every man’s life. Had 22nd Infantry been this scary? Maybe. Rolla thought briefly about his mother and father’s courtin’ time. Then he grabbed his cap and stopped one more time in the doorway to look at his family, all sitting at the table.
Father kept his head lowered to feed scraps to the hound. Grandma fed the baby from her plate. James pulled a face. Ma got up and followed Rolla to the front door.
“You look nice, Rolla.” She smoothed down the collar of his best shirt. “Aunt Mina’s has already put in a good word for you with the Symmingtons.”
“Tck, I wish women folk would mind their business,” Rolla mock-wailed, as he kissed his mother’s cheek. “’Bye, Ma.” Secretly he was grateful. He tipped his cap to her.
“Rolla, tell the Symmingtons we’ll see them in church this Sunday. Courtship isn’t the end of the world,” Ma said.
Rolla nodded. “I’ll tell them you said hello. If they need help plowing their next field, they can let me know.”
Rolla knew the way to the Symmingtons’ house. Just last fall, he’d helped clear stumps and rocks from a new field Mr. Symmington wanted cleared, and Rolla hadn’t taken any pay for it either. That and his time in the 22nd, they ought to make him good enough for any man’s daughter.
The walk offered him a few more minutes to practice his speech, almost like a prayer now. Pray every day. He walked past the churchyard. Under his breath, “Mr. Symmington, could I pay court and come to see your daughter? Ask her out of an evening? I’m asking for your permission, sir.” Rolla had designed the words and the expression on his face. What he’d do with his hands. He was confident of his statement, as confident as three years of high school, the 22nd Infantry, Demolition Division, his handiwork skills, and working season after season on various farms could make him. His family was upstanding citizens, finest people in the town. Preacher Bob told them so every Sunday as they exited the church. Rolla took one last secret feel of his cap, his shirt collar, his shirt front, best he could manage, and headed toward the Symmington house on the next street. He saw success blooming around him in the evening air. With her father’s permission, Rolla could court sixteen-year-old Miss Viola Symmington.
Shank of the Evening, Reckonings
“One more time, don’t come near my daughter Viola. She’s too young for you. I appreciate the 22nd Infantry, but you’re a man of the world,” said the father, edging even closer to Rolla and whipping his finger in Rolla’s face. “Plus, our family is of the merchant class. What’s your family, son?”
Symmington and Rolla had excused themselves from the front parlor to the railroad tracks that ran across Center Street, out of the hearing range of everyone else. Man-to-man conversations took place at the railroad tracks. Iron will and iron horses. Power, iron rails, spikes and steam.
“My family are farmers and proud of it, sir.” Rolla looked Old Man Symmington right in both eyes. In his past, Rolla had pinned his knife through eyes meaner than those. “I’d take care of Viola, sir. Treat her with respect.” Rolla’s chin almost touched Old Man Symmington’s chin in a lover’s nudge. They could have rolled a cigarette between their chins and noses.
“Don’t come near Viola. Don’t ask me again.” Old Man Symmington spat and turned his back on Rolla. Rolla stood up two inches taller and started calculating firepower.
Almost Midnight
Boom. The dynamite Rolla White used forced apart wooden planks, iron nails and propelled them skyward. Small flames babbled like tongues and grew. Smoke roiled skyward. The Symmington General Store shelves blew up, blasted their treasures with them. Cans of Clabber Girl baking powder, pepper, salt, cloves, cinnamon, crocks of pickles, the cracker barrel, the bag and string holder, the counter, the Indian cigar statue, chewing tobacco, bolts of fabric, planking, OXO soup, George Mugridge & Sons Biscuits, J.G. Ivers & Son Steam Bakery, fishing tackle, coffee pots, the cash register, the telegraph key, all blasted outward and upward. Debris whirled skyward, telescoped outward to blacken the evening.
Rolla enjoyed the sight for a few seconds. He thought the 22nd Infantry might not approve, but his heart was black and broken. Then he sensed townspeople waking up coming outside to look, starting toward the scene, scattering in first waves of panic but then summoning the volunteer fire department.
I served in the 22nd Infantry, he thought, but I’m not good enough to court Viola Symmington. I’m not good enough for her father, on this late Day of Our Lord, June 17, 1867. He had never thought he’d be denied the pleasure of courting Viola Symmington. His heart was broken into more dirty pieces than the explosion he created.
All the contents of the Symmington General Store, all blown to smithereens in a skyward blast of anger, youth, and denial. Rolla turned his back. Who would he tell first? Words failed him again as people pushed past him to see the commotion. He kept walking, oblivious to spraying as the boom settled itself back into a harrumph over the astonished town as he walked away.
I had an itch to hitch, Rolla thought, still walking toward Preacher Bob’s house. No more. He opened the churchyard gate and then closed it. Then he thought of what had been his last act as a free man in his parents’ house: pushing open the screen door and saying good-bye to his mother.
The fire bell was clanging now. Men were stumbling over each other, vying to be first to put out the fire, yelling, turning, twisting, a human flame struggling for direction, panic before purpose in the only general store in the county.
“Nothing to put out,” Rolla said, squared his shoulders and marched up the stone path. Ma had said they’d see who on Sunday? Oh, yeah, by Sunday he’d be dead or in jail.
Back to TOC
A Calceologist Has a Bad Day
Jamie Catcher
“Faerie Culpepper. The woman of the shoes, they call you.”
The detective introduced himself as Detective Deranged-kangaroo, or something like that. I was too distracted by his shoes and their gleam to pay attention. I will think of him as Detective Shiny Shoe.
“I didn’t do it.”
A red shoe sits in a clear plastic evidence bag on the table in front of me, and I inch forward in the desire to save it. This all began with a missing shoe and now here I am—defending my life—with a found shoe in an interrogation room that smells of lemon floor cleaner and faint cigar smoke.
Or did you do it for the heel of it? That’s what he’ll say next. I imagine the words forming from his pillowy lips, the fleshy pink pinched with a nice Cupid’s bow, but he purses his lips together instead, and only nods. They are prize lips; I noticed them immediately when he came to arrest me. I appreciated the tiny touch of beauty in the ugly moment
of being surrounded by cops and handcuffed while sitting at my kitchen table, having coffee with the vice president of the Junior Ladies Bonne Society Club. We’d been planning a charity shoe auction and I’ll never, ever, forget the look on her face.
He sits across the table from me and says nothing, his face stony as he grinds his teeth back and forth, then sucks his bottom lip in. I wonder if he notices me staring at his lips. Maybe that’s why he continues such grand lip activity.
I also wonder what he thought of my shoe collection.
My beautiful, beautiful shoes. Did he walk into my shoe room and look around in awe? Did he touch the white wooden cubbies that lined the wall from floor to ceiling? Maybe he flicked on the lights above the protective glass of the showcase for the Chosen Four. While rows and rows of my shoes are tiny representatives of past times and cultures, those four pairs of shoes meant my future.
Coco Chanel said that with four pairs of shoes, she could travel the world. So, I had four pairs chosen for my trip. There was a pair of tall brown boots for attitude and bad weather, and a pair of burgundy ballet flats for naps on mass transit and good measure. A pair of utilitarian black loafers rounded up the pack—my sightseeing heavyweights—and then there was the pair of cherry red stilettos. I daydreamed of wearing them on a hot date. All were patiently tanned and hand-sewn, and met my criteria of sturdy yet beautiful.
The detective taps his fingers, and I hear his watch tick as the walls of the interrogation room seem to tighten. My throat is dry and the urge to swallow hits, but I fight it off in front of his stare.
Tick.
When I blink, images blur and turn like the glass in a kaleidoscope. When I saw the left shoe of my red pair was missing, I screamed and I screamed. I clutched my head, the screams spinning around me, mingling with Jack’s laughter.
Tick.
“There was an old lady who lived in a shoe,” Detective Shiny Shoe says under his breath as he rustles papers and adjusts in his wooden seat.
The sense of humor I hear in his voice wants to spill now, but he’s holding it together. I bet he’s actually a fun guy, but as if I haven’t heard that old shoe line before. I smile and sit up straighter in my posterior-numbing wooden seat to play along with the game.
“Who had so many children, she didn’t know what to do,” I say. I hope he knows I’m the victim here. He has to see it and let me go home to my shoes so I can finish packing and print the train tickets for Venice to Florence. I paid extra for two nicer seats: one seat for me, and one for the Chosen Four.
He raises his eyebrows at me and I keep talking.
“Women do like their shoes, as do many men. I see you’re wearing an Italian-made loafer in a US size 12, but I’m sure it’s marked Euro size 46. They appear to be hand-constructed, which is rare these days. Probably in Tuscany. Florence, specifically. Did your wife buy them secondhand? I doubt on your salary you could afford them new. You should be proud to wear an Italian cobbler’s work. They’re not Salvatore Ferragamos, but they’re close.”
He glowers during my spiel and then raises his leg to plop his foot on the table. He stares at the shoe, pulls it off, and looks inside. “Well, now. Made in Italy. Size 46. I never noticed. Bravo, Madam Shoe.” He puts his shoe back on, lowers his foot to the floor, and looks down at the loafer, perhaps with new appreciation.
As he should. They were a fine pair of shoes, a remnant of the days when shoes were made lovingly by hand over hours and hours in a small room with scattered mounds of leather, wooden shoe forms, and tiny tools.
“I’ve always wondered if it was true that the cobbler’s wife went barefoot, as the old adage goes,” he says. He pulls two Chapsticks out of his coat pocket and applies one and then the other liberally to his lips in a very exact process, one that took him some time.
I watch, thinking he seems quite preoccupied by his lip activity in general. “If I married a cobbler, I’d want the pick of the lot.” I say, then remember I’ve sworn off men, even shoemakers.
The air conditioner turns on, mingling the lemon cleaner and cigar smoke with the smell of someone’s curry take-out dinner, and the hairs on my arms rise. I feel sick. To calm myself, I imagine the feel of a new Italian shoe on my foot, one with tender leather molded to my foot.
“Your ex,” the detective says, “what did he think of you and your shoes? Living like that in a self-made shrine of shoes? Or did he not care because you supported him, that is, until he met her, and she made more money than you?”
Living like that. Why was I being judged for admiring beauty? For loving the smell of buttery soft leather and a hand-sewn sole with the heel stacked and pressed with exactness? For admiring centuries of artisans and craftsmanship? I want to knock the detective’s Chapsticks off the table.
“I don’t care if she made more. I do just fine in cybersecurity at the hospital. And I think of my collection as being a shoe museum. I collect many shoes of the past. You can learn a lot about an era and about a person from their shoes. Their income. Their personality. The style of their culture and the technology of the time period. It’s called calceology.”
“Calceology, hmm.” He leans back and crosses his arms. “Our cyber guy has heard of you. Spoke well of you. He says he sees you at conferences.”
I fidget. I sit taller, cross my legs, and concentrate. My bladder passed its emergency mark at least an hour ago, and I feared standing up meant a water show. Maybe that was why the floor cleaner reeked so strong in here.
Now he leans toward me. “Have you always tucked shoes into little beds and pulled up the covers on them like they were babies? Did you give them some broth without any bread, whip them all soundly and put them to bed?” he sing-songs, finishing his page in Mother Goose as if he just can’t help it.
So now it begins—the questioning of my sanity. I nod. “Yes, I have. And when do I get my shoe back?”
“You mean the murder weapon found at the scene? You don’t. It’s evidence. Your ex tells us you sleep with shoes in your bed, and I did see shoes there. Did you just scoot them over when he was around, or did they replace him after he left you for her?”
Funny how you can take a moment in time, a bad moment, and wall it away in your brain, this dark little room that your day-to-day thoughts ignore as they waltz on by. And then boom. The door bursts open, spilling the dark out into your every thought, and taking over your brain in a rush that leaves you struggling for breath while your brain screams.
I feel the heat flush my cheeks at the memory of seeing two people smile at each other in the park. I had followed him there, suspicious that he would meet someone. I hid in the trees but once I saw them, I had to look straight to her shoes. She wore pleather size sevens from the fall collection at the corner department store. Machine-made. Cemented-together soles. But a fine knock-off of a famous designer who had her shoes handmade by some the world’s best shoe artisans. I wanted to hate her for her shoes, but I couldn’t. They were actually a good choice for today’s assembly line market. So, I hated him instead.
“Witnesses say there was a loud confrontation last night at his apartment. You accused your ex and his lover of stealing a single shoe.”
That part is true, but did he have to say lover?
“I did go to Jack’s, but I left both of them alive,” I say. Again I think, I am the victim and I will the detective to see it.
“When I returned home from work yesterday, the left side of Pair One’s cubby sat empty. Jack had been over to get his things, and by the lingering smell of perfume in the house, I knew she came with him. They were the only people in my house yesterday.” She had already admitted she loved my shoe collection months ago. She’d once been my so-called new friend, all chatty and asking a zillion questions, and then Jack walks in, and her eyes pop.
“Of course, I accused them of stealing my shoe. It’s completely like Jack to take one shoe just to piss me off.”
“It must have been hard. Being replaced by a younger woman.”
The detective tilts his head in apparent thought at this, and then rubs the dark stubble flecked with red that lines his jaw. He closes his notebook, and I think, This is it. I’m free to go. I’ve surprised him with my coolness, my acceptance. I’m not crying and blubbering and raging around slamming my fists to the table like a dumped partner. He knows I’m innocent. I am the victim.
“Your fingerprints were all over the murder weapon.”
“You mean the shoe. Of course, they were. It’s my shoe.”
“You suspected Jack and his new girlfriend stole a single shoe to taunt you. A joke sent you into a rage. I think you hid in the bushes and tackled her, then you stabbed her repeatedly with the high heel of the stolen shoe’s mate.”
Okay, now this guy is just an idiot in nice shoes.
“Its five-inch heel was plunged into her carotid artery, according to the medical examiner.”
I look to the table. My poor baby sitting in the evidence bag without air. I hate how it looks now, the heel soaked in her blood, and blood spatters all over the upper.
“After the screaming match over the stolen shoe, the one the neighbors reported, you waited outside in the garden, and when she went for a jog, you took out your revenge, didn’t you?”
“Did Jack tell you all this? Are you going to believe everything Jack says? Maybe I didn’t care as much about Jack as Jack thinks. And his new girlfriend and I were surprisingly cool around one another. We both like shoes and I know she really liked my collection. I didn’t hate her and I didn’t kill her.”
He leans back, his lips apart, and his eyes squinting.
I cross my arms, wincing as I sink down into my chair, the hard wood slats making my lower back twinge with pain. My thoughts scramble from I need a lawyer to My plans for tomorrow are absolute rubbish now to why didn’t I buy trip insurance? I don’t know of anyone who would post my bail, so I’ll probably be sleeping in jail tonight, and there’ll be no one to tuck my shoes in. I picture the tiny white cubicles, unkempt and alone.
Carolina Crimes Page 5